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Happy New Year, may it be a wonderfully growing experience for you.\u00a0 It has begun that way for me at the third MEPI training that took place in the auditorium of the University of Hassan II in Mohammadia.\u00a0 The five Student Interns conducted the entire training. Alexandra Stein, HAF Country Director, and I supervised this dynamic group from the sidelines.\u00a0 It was great.\u00a0 This time the primary object of the training was to have a wholistic training that would be individually inclusive of each and every student and their opinions in a debate forum. The group contained forty young minds.\u00a0 As such, the Student Interns (SI) led the trainees to define, combine (where possible), and prioritize each of the 19 projects they had agreed to in their nine tables the week before.<\/p>\n
This time instead of tables the chairs were placed on one large circle and the training began with each trainee introducing her\/himself. \u00a0 Mohammed, Safae, Tima, and the two Younes\u2019, the five SI, introduced themselves.\u00a0 I then took the floor for a few minutes. I had the trainees all stand up, asked them to stretch, and then requested that they move and sit next to someone they did not know.\u00a0 They complied with some hesitation and prodding.\u00a0 It was interesting to me that there was hesitation since in the US, my students would comply without hesitating.\u00a0 I later asked the SI about that and they said that here groups tend to bond almost like family and hate to be parted when they are in group.<\/p>\n
I went on to express the importance of the training in terms of community involvement, self-growth, familial benefit, as well as the benefit to the university and the individual communes with which they would be working, and even the entire nation.\u00a0 Additionally I told them that once they prioritized their project, we would attempt to work with the administration of the University to secure funding for their priorities.<\/p>\n
Again as with the last two trainings, a few students had trickled in at the appointed hour, 11:45, but the room was not completely full of students until well after 12:25 or so.\u00a0 However we began the individual introductions when a little more than half of the students were present.\u00a0 I was overjoyed to see that the majority of the students present this time where students from the past two trainings \u2013we have established our group. It was also great to see the faces of 3 members of the broader Mohammedia community who had come back for the session.<\/p>\n
Tima had made a PowerPoint of the nine projects chosen last time through the pair-wise process; with two priorities, and of the other ten projects.\u00a0 Each item was presented and discussed within the group.\u00a0 There was enthusiastic discussion on each of the 19 item.\u00a0 During the process of defining each project in narrow and agreed-upon terms, some were combined ending with a total of eight projects.\u00a0 And finally votes were taken to prioritize the eight items.<\/p>\n
Of great interest to me was the difference in the voting for priorities when then trainees were only allowed to vote once per the eight items and when they were allowed to vote for each item.\u00a0 The difference was quite dramatic.\u00a0 For example, in the first round of voting the \u201cGood Governance\u201d received 15 votes and 40 votes in the second round! In both instances it was the top project.\u00a0 The same was not true for the other priorities which also had quite different votes, but were ranked differently.\u00a0 In the first vote the \u201cCampus\u201d was the second project priority with fourteen votes, while in the second vote it only received thirteen votes coming in a distant fifth.\u00a0 In second place in the second round of voting was \u201cPartnership between the university and companies for recruitment,\u201d with 25 votes and which had only received one vote in the prior vote!<\/p>\n
Once the priorities were set, the trainees were to sign up for training and working with the Communes, then snacks and evaluations were then distributed.\u00a0 It was decided to hold future trainings in smaller groups dedicated to working with the Communes.<\/p>\n
By telephone all the attending trainees were polled and thirty trainees agreed to attend the next training on 7 January, which was postponed due to student protests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0\u00a0 Azul La Luz, PhD., CCHt, HAF Curriculum Expert Mohammadia, Morocco Happy New Year, may it be a wonderfully growing experience for you.\u00a0 It has begun that way for me at the third MEPI training that took place in the auditorium of the University of Hassan II in Mohammadia.\u00a0 The five Student Interns conducted the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/mepi-full-logo-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}